


Sneaky Cell Phone

by rebelmeg



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Barton Family, F/M, Tony Stark Has A Heart
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-16
Updated: 2016-06-16
Packaged: 2018-07-15 10:02:45
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,367
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7218067
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rebelmeg/pseuds/rebelmeg
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Tony may or may not have liked the Barton family enough to add them to his little collection of people he takes care of.</p>
<p>After Age of Ultron, before Civil War.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Sneaky Cell Phone

**Author's Note:**

> I'm one of the twelve people that loved Clint's family in Age of Ultron, and I have all sorts of little headcanons concerning them and how the Avengers associate with them. Here's one of them involving Tony and his somewhat "boundaries, what boundaries?" way of caring.

“Romanov!” Tony called out, catching the redhead’s attention before she left the room. She nodded at him, and stepped back until he caught up with her.

“Does Laura know?” He asked in an undertone, putting his mouth as close to her ear as he could without looking like he was trying to neck her.

Natasha glanced around, making sure no one was around. “No. We have no contact with her, except through Clint’s phone. He insisted on that.”

“So she’s not even gonna know he’s missing? Until he doesn’t call?”

Natasha shrugged, looking helpless. “I was going to take his quinjet and fly there tonight, let her know in person. If I can get away.”

Tony was thinking, staring at nothing while he filtered ideas with his not inconsiderable brainpower, and he flickered back to the conversation for a second. “ _His _ __quinjet?”__

“Fury has one always on standby for Clint to take home. Anytime he can get away.”

“Nice of him.”

“What are you thinking about?”

“Letting her know. I can take care of it.”

“Stark, you show up there in the suit, she’ll shoot you with her twelve gauge shotgun before you can clear radar-tracked airspace.”

Tony grinned slightly, liking Mrs. Barton more every minute. “Not that. I’ll contact her. It won’t be traced.”

Natasha looked like she was going to protest, but then looked at him and the seriousness in his eyes. “If anyone can do it, you can.” She glanced around again, then shifted as if she was preparing to leave. “I have no knowledge of what you’re doing.”

Then she was gone. Tony took that as her blessing, and he was having Friday prepare the program at home as he walked out to his car.

\---------------------

“Friday, we booted up?”

“Yes, sir, the program is loaded and ready to initialize.”

“Lock down the room and get it going. Nothing in or out of here until we're done, not even air.”

Faint thumping and clicking sounds heralded the complete security lockdown of Tony’s office, and the lights were brightened as the windows, though already one-way, darkened to flat black.

“Sir, a webcam check shows that Mrs. Barton is on the home computer right now.”

“Excellent. Send her a pigeon.”

Somewhere in the Midwest, Laura Barton was sending an email to her son’s teacher when a bizarre cooing sound and a popup at the bottom left of the screen caught her attention.

It was just a small white screen, like an instant messaging box, and it had the text, “Go to the barn.” And a symbol… of a purple arrow.

Warning lights went off in her head. She was no idiot, she and Clint had always been fully aware that someday their location might be compromised, and they were as prepared as possible. However, she’d always expected it to be a lot more… dramatic?

Her instincts, that were always unfortunately attuned to the darker side of things, were inclined to believe that she should grab the kids and head down into the bunker now, right after pulling the alarm that sent a signal to Nick’s phone. But the purple arrow made her pause.

It seemed… like something Clint would do.

Laura sat there for several seconds, deliberating, before she finally stood up. Sending the kids to the bunker first, she then headed out to the barn, her footsteps quickly eating up the distance as her eyes raked over her surroundings.

She heard it before she opened the barn door, a ringing that sounded exactly like a telephone. A quick walk-around of the barn led her right to the tractor that Stark had given them as a thank-you for hosting them last year during the Ultron disaster, and tucked into the glovebox was the cell phone that was the source of the ringing. It was an older design, a flip phone with a tiny screen on the front with a lit picture of Tony Stark flashing a peace sign. It continued to ring as she held it, trying to decide what to do.

Against all her better judgment, Laura answered the call. “Hello?”

“Laura? Can I call you that? It’s Tony Stark.”

Not what she was expecting, but oh, well. “I think my first question is how.”

“Which how, there are a lot of how’s going on? Before we get to that, you need to know something.”

She knew before he said it, her fingers tightening on the phone. “Clint?”

“He’s missing. He and Cap. We’re looking for them, but… I thought you should know.”

Her voice came out steady, even though there was a lump in her throat exactly the size of her heart. “Is he dead? Tell me.”

“We don’t think so. I’m not lying to you.”

A slow, measured breath left her, and she closed her eyes for a moment. 

“Laura?”

“I’m here.”

“Did you still want to know the how, or are we over that?”

A distraction was always a good thing. “Tell me.”

“This call can’t be traced. At all. I have an algorithm set to bounce the signal literally all over the world, ad infinitum. It will never come back to your location, or mine. You are still a secret, still safe.”

“That’s good.”

“Obviously, I hid the phone in the tractor. I hacked into your computer a tiny bit so I could alert you if I ever felt the phone was necessary.”

“Just a tiny bit?”

“Barton would kill me if I came across sexy Mrs. Clint photos, so yes, only a tiny bit.”

A small smile lifted the corner of her mouth. “That’s very nice of you.”

“I’m a gem, I really am, don’t listen to anything else anyone says about me.”

There was silence for a moment, then she asked the question she was most afraid of asking. “How?”

Apparently Mr. Stark knew exactly what she wanted to know. “It’s kind of complicated, the short version is he and Cap were scouting some suspicious activity in Europe. They were between checkpoints when their signal cut off, and they haven’t made a scheduled call in. We’ve got a local team on-site, and Thor and Natasha are on their way there now. She was going to come by tonight, but she probably won’t make it.”

“I understand.” She chewed on the inside of her lip for a minute, unsure what to do with herself. “Thank you, Mr. Stark.”

“Please, it’s Tony with friends.”

She smiled a little, comforted and extremely weirded-out that she was friends with Tony Stark. “Thank you, Tony. Thank you for telling me.”

“Anytime. Turn that phone off now, and put it back where you found it. I can have it remote-activated if we need to get ahold of you again on the sly.”

“Tony?”

“Mm?”

She had to swallow in order to get her voice to work. “Bring him home.”

The world-famous billionaire/Avenger on the other end of the line sounded like he had to clear his throat a little before he replied, “We will.” The conviction in his voice was better than a promise.

\-------------------

It wasn’t even six hours later that the combined forces of Man Merida and Betsy Ross Model (Tony needs to stop with the nicknames, really) were able to make contact with Natasha and Thor, and twenty-four hours later they were sitting down to a debriefing at the compound. Two hours after that, Clint was heading for the door and making a beeline to his own private quinjet, but he paused as he went.

“Stark, what the hell is this I hear about you planting a phone in that stupid shiny tractor you got me?”

Tony glanced up from his phone, a slight grin around the edges of his mouth. “I didn’t give you a tractor. I gave your wife a tractor. She’s the one that had to cook for us.”

“So not the point, man-in-a-can.” Ha, Clint's bad with the nicknames too!

“Totally the point.” Tony rebutted, and his mind was halfway back to what he was doing when—

“Tony?”

Barton hadn’t ever used his name before, so it caught his attention fairly quickly. “Yeah?”

“Thank you.”

Tony didn’t have to ask what for. He nodded, maintaining eye contact. “Anytime.”


End file.
